Ali Abdullah Saleh once described ruling Yemen as “dancing over the heads of snakes.” The former president’s reported death Monday, at the hands of Houthi rebels who were his allies just a few days ago, shows not only the perils of that balancing act, but also the political shifts in a country wracked by civil war since 2015. More importantly, perhaps, is that it shows how difficult it will be to resolve the civil war—and the proxy fight between Saudi Arabia and Iran that helps fuel it—in the most impoverished country in the Arab world.

Saleh’s apparent death, six years after Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was killed and his body paraded on the streets of his hometown of Sirte, will send a signal to strongmen around the world, most notably Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Assad is more firmly in control of Syria than at any point since the civil war began in March 2011. But his rule, despite military and diplomatic support from Russia and Iran, is fragile. Syria’s Arab neighbors and Turkey all want him gone—as does the United States. As long as he remains in power, instability will almost certainly remain a feature of Syrian politics and life. But the fate of Saleh and Qaddafi before him is a powerful example of what dictators most fear—not just losing their power, but losing their lives. Assad could thus cling closer to his political benefactors in order to ensure he doesn’t meet the same fate.

After Saddam Hussein, who was hanged in Iraq in 2006, and Qaddafi, Saleh is the third former Arab dictator to be killed following a regime change in the region. Other longtime Arab leaders, from Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, were also ousted in the Arab uprisings of 2011, but survived. Where leaders clung on to power in the face of protests, such as in Syria and Bahrain, civil war and political unrest, respectively, have become the norm. And the fates of Hussein and Qaddafi, in particular, are believed to preoccupy another incumbent dictator outside the Middle East: Regional experts say Kim Jong Un accelerated his nuclear and missile programs in part because both leaders, after giving up such programs, saw their regimes and their lives ended. They say he sees these weapons as an insurance policy against ending up like them.

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Saleh never possessed weapons of mass destruction. But in the nearly four decades since he assumed the presidency in 1978 of what was then North Yemen, he consolidated his power and that of his family. At various points, he allied with Saudi Arabia, the United States in its war on terrorism, and Saddam. But as the Arab Spring swept through the region, his hold on power became tenuous. Protests against him grew, he barely survived an assassination attempt, and agreed in 2012 to hand over power to his deputy, Abd Rabbu-Mansour Hadi.

Things might have stayed that way had it not been for the Houthis. In September 2014, the group which is allied with Iran, reached Sanaa and took control of parts of the Yemeni capital. In February 2015, they announced they were dissolving Parliament and taking control of the country. Yemen’s neighbors quickly took their positions. Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies backed Hadi’s government. Iran supported the Houthis, its Shia brethren. Saleh entered the conflict on the side of the Houthis, his supporters fighting alongside the rebels. Hadi, the vice president-turned president, sought refuge in Saudi Arabia. The conflict that followed has resulted in the deaths of at least 8,000 people, the displacement of some 3 million people, the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, and well-chronicled outbreaks of famine and cholera.

The civil war appeared unending, as did the shifting political alliances. On Saturday, Saleh appeared on television to say his alliance with the Houthis was ending over political differences, and that he was open to dialogue with the Saudi-led coalition. The Saudis welcomed the statement. Saleh’s forces appeared to take control of Sanaa, but in the fighting that followed, more than 100 people were killed and 200 wounded. The Houthis, who accused Saleh of staging a “coup,” bombed his house, killing him. Pictures subsequently posted on social media appeared to show Saleh with a head wound. Houthi media reported that the former Yemeni president was dead. Al Arabiya, the Saudi broadcaster, also reported Saleh’s death.

Saleh’s killing dims the prospect of any political resolution of the Yemen conflict. Saudi Arabia and its allies, on one side, and the Houthis and Iran, on the other, are only likely to become further entrenched in their positions. The promise of the Arab Spring gave way to political nightmares in almost all of the countries where there were calls for political change. And in Yemen, one of the worst of those nightmares continues.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

A man named François is a professor in Paris. He is a scholar of Joris-Karl Huysmans, an obscure 19th-century author who, in his later years, converted to Catholicism in an epiphany. François is the hero, or rather anti-hero, of French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. François is listless—even his attitude toward sex is uninspired, as if it’s an activity like any other, perhaps like playing tennis on a Sunday, but probably with less excitement. There is too much freedom and too many choices, and sometimes he’d rather just die.

The world around him, though, is changing. It is 2022. After a charismatic Islamist wins the second round of the French presidential elections against the right-wing Marine Le Pen (after gaining the support of the Socialists), a Muslim professor, himself a convert, attempts to persuade François to make the declaration of faith. “It’s submission,” the professor tells him. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.”